Middle English Dictionary Research Articles

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 2023 Symposium ‘Historical English Word-Formation’

It has not yet been ten years since Klaus Dietz (2015: 1915) prophesised that "[f]uture research work [on historical word-formation in English] will profit by two kinds of new instruments: firstly, by the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) and its Web Corpus, by the Middle English Dictionary (MED) and by the nascent third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and secondly, by new corpora of historical English." The proceedings of the 2023 symposium respond to those predictions in manifold ways. Under the heading ‘Historical English Word-Formation’, the organisers of the symposium intended to “bring together researchers studying diachronic English word-formation and to showcase current research in this area” (Majewski 2023: 287). Although no particular temporal, thematic, or methodological focus was asked for, the five essays provide answers to some of the general questions that the symposium had initially raised, namely: How have large-scale corpus analyses and respective computational tools helped us study diachronic changes in the formation of new words? Which recent insights are there into the frequency and productivity as well as the rules and restrictions of word-formation units and patterns in the history of English? Further, which roles do regional, social, medial, and other factors as well as text types and (non‑)literary genres play for the creation of new words? The five contributions to this special issue of ZWJW illustrate that, as Dietz had anticipated, the study of word formations in past stages of English has profited extremely from the advances made in computational research and Artificial Intelligence, yet they also delineate both their advantages and limitations.

Loanwords and polysemy: An investigation of specialized domain lexis in Middle English

This study investigates the polysemy of French loanwords in Middle English, analysing the attested senses of loan lexis in three occupational domains. Senses recorded in the Dictionnaire du moyen français and the Anglo-Norman dictionary were compared with corresponding lexical entries in the Middle English dictionary. Out of over 100 Middle English items borrowed from French, it is found that the great majority were polysemous in ways reflecting the source language semantics. This outcome contrasts with the usual finding that foreign borrowing in modern contexts produces monosemous loanwords. The conclusion is therefore drawn that the process of borrowing from French was of a different nature in the English medieval period. It is argued that bilingual users of French were agents of borrowing who replicated source word polysemy in their English. The likelihood that senses matching those of the French etymon arose in Middle English independently of source language polysemy is considered, but rejected.

To hele them of somme sekenesses and maladyes and all illness of the stomach. On the rivalry between illness, sickness and malady in Middle English

The present paper analyses the fates of the native nouns illness and sickness and those of the French borrowing malady in Middle English. Focusing on the regional and temporal dimensions of their rivalry, the study uses the evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (ICMEP, Markus 2008), a collection of 129 works of Middle English prose. The analysis also makes use of other databases such as Collins English Dictionary (CED), the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), Middle English Dictionary online (MED), Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD), and the Oxford English Dictionary online (OED). The degree of the adaptability of the terms in question is best reflected in their varied frequency in the ICMEP’s texts. The tentative research results place malady (107 attestations in total) far behind its Germanic equivalent sickness (701 attestations). A single instance of illness testifies to its low recognisability in the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, probably due to its being often replaced by sickness, which leads to a considerable reduction in the use of the term.

Selected Middle English adjectives of happiness: their representation in the Innsbruck Corpus

The present paper analyses the fates of the Middle English synonyms of the adjective happy. The group of the examined words contains adjectives beneurous, benewred, felicious, gracious, seely and the key item happy. Focusing on their fates in the period under question, the study uses data from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English, a collection of 129 Middle English digitised texts, preserved in 159 files, to determine token frequency, text distribution and semantic changes of the examined adjectives. Other sources used in the study are Middle English Dictionary (MED), The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) and AntConc, a freeware corpus analysis program. The evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose shows considerable discrepancies in the token frequency of the analysed terms and the number of attestations employed in the sense ‘happy’. Although the position of the adjective gracious was extraordinarily strong (354 attestations), the termyielded only 13 attestations used in the sense under study. The marginal status of benewred (2 attestations)and lack of beneurous in the Middle English texts examined announce their loss at the end of the period.

John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner

Reviewed by: John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner Matthew Boyd Goldie Emily Steiner. John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 287. $80.00. John Trevisa, father of English prose? Is that a prosaic father, or can informative writing be beautiful? What contributions to a history of style does [End Page 425] a translator make? What is the relationship between facts and literature? When have there been "information ages"? Emily Steiner's John Trevisa's Information Age asks these questions and offers thoughtful answers in seven carefully researched chapters. Each draws attention to Trevisa's contributions to English, English literature, and English "information culture" (1). The book contends that Trevisa's translations of compendious works helped shape English literary prose style and English literature more broadly by making English a suitable and even eloquent vernacular to communicate historical, scientific, and didactic learning. As most readers know perhaps more implicitly than explicitly, Trevisa translated Ranulph Higden's universal history, the Polychronicon; Bartholomaeus Anglicus's encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum; Giles of Rome's mirror for princes, De regimine principum; and other shorter works. As David Fowler suggested in his 1995 biography, Trevisa was possibly from Cornwall and spent most of his life at Oxford before securing a position as chaplain, canon, and vicar for Thomas de Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is presumed to have died in 1402, so he is an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. His works survive in about thirty manuscripts as well as early prints by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Thomas Berthelet, and Stephen Batman. Steiner concentrates on the Polychronicon and De proprietatibus rerum more than on De regimine principum or other translations, and she also glances sideways into Trevisa's "information age" by considering Piers Plowman, the Concordance to the Wycliffite Bible (c. 1425), and the earlier versified encyclopedia Le livre de Sydrac (c. 1275). Most of the chapters examine Trevisa's divergences from and additions to his sources, the characteristics of his style, and how the large scale of his translations makes the late fourteenth century an age of information in England, following similar projects in France and elsewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One recurring topic in the book concerns form—the compendium versus the monograph and how book history and the canon would look if we considered the compilation as central to manuscript and print publication. After all, if every compilation/compendium/florilegium/collecte/recueil/gathering/miscellany/"litel tretys"/anthology were tallied, they might add up to more copies than the single-text or single-author book, with arguably more cultural influence. Steiner posits that "what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia," with Trevisa translating and glossing, for example, the Poly-chronicon, to form a "megagenre" or "super-compendium" so that he [End Page 426] "provided an intellectual and literary rationale for English prose" (25, 30). Just in terms of the vernacular, although possibly overrepresented in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, Trevisa remains a major source for the lexicon, with 9,553 contributions in 6,279 entries in the OED. Another key topic is the idea of an Information Age in England c. 1400. Steiner proposes that "our attachments to those texts we call literary, and which we invest with richness and complexity, have roots in medieval information culture," describing Trevisa as "the perfect entry point into a literary history of information" (12). She stresses that "Every age is, in its own way, an information age, and the late fourteenth century was no exception. … It was not merely the age before the printing press or the age before the internet, but also the age in which the collection and classification of knowledge was bound up with the production of vernacular literature" (227). In Steiner's reading, Trevisa, who likely knew John Wyclif at Oxford, does not simply translate in a straight manner but has works that "criticize the professional religious and redefine the relationship between clergy and laity" while...

French lexis in the Auchinleck Manuscript: A digital-philological approach

AbstractThe Auchinleck Manuscript was produced in the 1330s in London and is best known to scholars of Middle English literature on account of the romances that it transmits. Several of these texts treat the establishment and defense of England and it has been argued that their interest in English history is matched by the language in which almost all of the manuscript’s texts are written: English. This article reconsiders the Englishness of the Auchinleck Manuscript via a quantitative analysis of its lexis. We show that a comparatively large proportion of the Auchinleck lexicon has connections to French and that, of these words with French connections, many do not appear to have been much used in English writing before the 1300s. Our statistics are derived via program scripts that match Auchinleck lexicon items to headword entries in the Middle English Dictionary and collect data pertaining to word etymology and earliest dates of citation from those entries. Where previous studies have emphasized the porous boundaries between English and French in 14th-century English contexts, we posit that some poets might aim to make creative capital out of the deliberate juxtaposition of the languages. The argument is supported by a series of visualizations; interactive versions of these visualizations and the data on which they are based are archived at our project website (https://solliryc.github.io/AuchinleckDataViz/).

Lone other-language items in later medieval texts

AbstractThis paper addresses the use in medieval texts of ‘lone other-language items’ (Poplack and Dion 2012), considering their status as loans or code-switches (Durkin 2014; Schendl and Wright 2011). French-origin and English-origin lexemes in Middle English, respectively, were taken from the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, a source of loan words chosen for its sociolinguistic representativeness and studied via Middle English Dictionary citations and textbase occurrences. Four criteria were applied for whether they should be treated as code-switches or as loans: the textual context in which the item appears, the adoption of target language verbal morphology, the length of attestation within the target language of individual lexical items (Matras 2009), and the integration of items into the syntactic structure of nominal phrases in conflict sites for code-switching (Poplack et al. 2015). Results provide little support for code-switching as the channel for the integration of lone other-language items, suggesting rather that individual items of foreign origin were immediately borrowed, consistently with Poplack and Dion’s (2012) treatment of contemporary contact phenomena.

Kinship or friendship?

AbstractThe use of the wordcousinas a term of address for non-relatives in late-medieval and Renaissance English is well documented in letters between monarchs, but weak for other social groups in the standard dictionaries, with one example each in theOxford English Dictionaryand theMiddle English Dictionary. As it is difficult to establish for earlier periods whether people were blood relations, an investigation ofcousinas a term of address needs to establish the relationship between addressor and addressee, as far as possible, from independent historical sources. This study is based on the use of the termcousinin letters, as this often provides precise information on the relationships of correspondents. This investigation documents the use ofcousinfrom the thirteenth to the early-sixteenth century in all literate ranks of society and concludes that the royal use ofcousinconstitutes a relic of an earlier more widespread use.

The Middle English Dictionary Revenant

The online Middle English Dictionary, after lying dormant for twenty years, during 2016–2019 staged a revival, receiving both new technical underpinnings (a new platform and interface) and considerable editorial revision, the latter drawing on decades of collected corrections as well as a fresh review of recent scholarship. The MED's unique organizational placement within the University of Michigan Library helped secure it the NEH funding necessary for the success of the immediate project, and it offers some hope for a future of ongoing revision and maintenance.

Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

<i>Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words</i>. Jonathan P. Lamb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v+243.

Chaucer's Cunning: An Incarnational Pun and an Omission in the Middle English Dictionary

Abstract The medieval existence of a sexual meaning for the word cunning, rendering the word itself available for sexual puns, remains unrecognized today, in part because the Middle English Dictionary (MED) fails to include any instance demonstrating such use. But a line from the popular Proverbs of Hending, written before 1325, witnesses to the fourteenth-century availability of the sense. This article discusses the value of literary puns, shows numerous instances in which Chaucer appears to pun sexually on the word cunning, and explains the incarnational implications of the linking of body and spirit in such a pun. It also explores the MED's omission of the relevant quotation from the entry for cunning, examining the MED's archived slips and considering the editorial conventions that should have required inclusion of the evidence from the Proverbs of Hending.

Editorial

Editorial Edward Finegan DICTIONARIES HAS PUBLISHED SEVERAL SPECIAL-TOPIC FORUMS in recent years, but this is the first special issue to appear in the journal in quite some time. In 2002, then-editor Michael Adams edited a special issue on "The Middle English Dictionary and Historical Lexicography" to celebrate completion of the MED. All but one of the articles in the special issue had been presented at the 2001 meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, held at the University of Michigan, home of the Middle English Dictionary. Initiated into historical lexicography as an editorial assistant on the MED project, Michael Adams serves as guest editor for the current issue. For this special issue, he has curated and edited a selection of articles under the umbrella he calls "Problems of Chronology in Historical Lexicography and Lexicology." All but one of the articles in this issue were presented at the International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology that met at Indiana University at Bloomington in 2016. Like its predecessor, this special issue contains only articles related to the topic; no reviews or reference works in progress contributions appear. The next issue of the journal will contain reviews and reference works in progress contributions, as well as articles. Future volumes of Dictionaries will aim to strike a balance between regular issues containing a variety of contributions to all sections of the journal and special issues or forums that focus on specific topics. In his introduction to this special issue, guest editor Adams expresses his appreciation to the contributors and the two referees who read all the articles and offered valuable counsel that helped bring the volume [End Page vii] to fruition. I echo that appreciation and express my gratitude as well to Michael Adams. His introduction to the issue is thorough and enlightening and leaves no need for anything further to be said here. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2018 Dictionary Society of North America

Why Stay at the Tabard? Public Inns and Their Amenities c. 1400

Why Stay at the Tabard?Public Inns and Their Amenities c. 1400 Martha Carlin When geoffrey chaucer set the opening scene of the Canterbury Tales at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, he was describing a new phenomenon: the hosting of a large and very mixed group of travelers at a commercial inn. In Chaucer's day, public inns such as the Tabard were a comparatively new institution, one that was beginning to have a major impact on medieval society. The spread of inns influenced social behavior, concepts of hospitality and status, the mobility of women, building design, patterns of commerce and employment, and networks of transport and communication. In considering the rise of inns and their emerging role in Chaucer's England, this article will focus on three topics: defining what a public inn was, identifying when inns began to spread widely in England, and discussing some sources that offer exceptional information about what it was like to stay at an English inn in the years around 1400. To begin with, what was an inn? In modern English, it is common to use terms such as "inn," "tavern," and "alehouse" as interchangeable synonyms for "pub." But in medieval England these words were not synonymous. Taverns and alehouses were drinking houses. Taverns sold wine, which was imported and expensive; they were like elite wine-bars today. Alehouses were small and often scruffy neighborhood boozers that sold ale but not wine. An inn—hospicium in Latin—was a large or elite urban house. The private townhouses of bishops, earls, and other magnates were known as "inns," as were the premises in London occupied by societies of lawyers and of apprentices at law, and the same word [End Page 413] was also used of public hostelries.1 In Chaucer's day, the primary function of public inns (hostelries) was to provide lodging and refreshment for travelers and their horses. In other words, they were hotels, not drinking-houses.2 Innkeeping as an occupation is recorded in England by the late twelfth century, but references to commercial inns and innkeeping are sparse before the fourteenth century, and English vocabulary relating to inns also seems to have developed after 1300. According to the Middle English Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest uses of "inn" (MED in) meaning hotel, and of "herbergeour" or "herberwer" (MED; OED harbinger), "host," "hostess," and "hosteler" (MED hostiler) meaning innkeeper, all date from the fourteenth century, and it is Chaucer himself who provides the first recorded use of the word "hostelry" (MED hostelrie) to mean a public inn. In London, the official regulation of innkeeping is first recorded in the reign of Edward I (1272–1307). At that time, innkeepers were simply required to be freemen (i.e., citizens of London, not merely residents),3 or else to provide good character witnesses and sureties. As in later years, the major concern was to keep track of all guests—whether English or foreign, lay or clerical—who might cause disturbances or commit crimes in the city.4 Between 1312 and 1343 new regulations required innkeepers to register with the alderman of their ward; to be responsible for their guests, and to disarm them; to report all suspicious persons who arrived at their inns; to refuse to lodge evildoers; and to keep strict hours.5 This surge in London's innkeeping regulations had [End Page 414] parallels in the general expansion of commercial and social regulation in the city, but it may also reflect an increase in the numbers of public inns. Outside London, the great rise of public inns seems to have begun after 1350: that is, after the Black Death.6 In Southwark, for example, the first clear reference to a public inn dates from 1338, but in 1381 twenty-two innkeepers were listed in the Southwark poll tax return.7 In Oxford, only one public inn is recorded before 1300. Some seven more occur between 1300 and 1349. In 1381 the Oxford poll tax return listed ten innkeepers, but by about 1400 Oxford had at least twenty-one commercial inns.8 Thus, during the course of the fourteenth century, Oxford went from having only one public inn to...

Volaten and Volating: Two Ghost Words in the Middle English Dictionary

THE Middle English Dictionary lists the verb volaten and the gerund volating as independent entries. The verb is said to mean ‘[t]o be nauseated; also, feel nauseated by (food and drink, or what one has already consumed), feel loathing for’, the definition for the gerund being ‘[f]eeling nauseated (by food and drink)’. As concerns the origin of the verb, the dictionary suggests, with a question mark, that it may be Medieval Latin volatus, past participle of volare.1 The etymology put forth is presumably motivated by the possibility of nausea leading to vomiting (cf. the phrasal verb throw up). The five citations for volaten and the one for volating come from a single work, Faye Getz’s edition of a Middle English translation of Gilbertus Anglicus’ Compendium medicinae.2 Several copies of the translation survive in medieval manuscripts, the one edited by Getz being found in Wellcome Library MS 537, fols 48r–310v.3 A close examination of Wellcome Library MS 537 shows that in the six example passages cited in the MED, the two words in fact begin with the letter w, not with the sequence vo. The spellings that occur on those folios are respectively wlatiþ (fol. 60r), wlaten (fol. 169r), wlate (fol. 191r), wlaten (fol. 270r), wlateþ (fol. 194v), and wlating (fol. 234v). The scribe’s way of forming the letter w is different from his shaping of the first two letters in words like voice (e.g. fols 134v and 147r) and vomeþ ‘foams’ (fol. 270v). The verb wlaten ‘become nauseated’ and the gerund wlating ‘nausea’ are frequently attested in Middle English writings.4 In Old English manuscripts, the forms wlatian, wlatung, and wlætung occur in similar senses.5 The words apparently became obsolete soon after the Middle English period, as the last citation of wlate v. in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated c. 1535, there being no recorded instances of wlating n. after the fifteenth century.6 The disappearance coincides with the falling away of the consonant group wl- in initial position, a development that took place by the sixteenth century.7

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel

Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016. Pp. lxviii, 391. ISBN: 978-155481-005-5. $19.95 (paperback); $13.95 (ebook).When I first started teaching medieval literature at the university level, there were no adequate teaching editions of Chaucer's great, yet difficult poem Troilus and Criseyde. It is experientially hard for the 'yonge, fresshe folks, he or she' addressed in the poem's envoi to gain access to it except through feats of the sympathetic imagination. Before we even get there, though, both the poem's language and its imbrication in an increasingly inaccessible literary tradition daunt the fresh young contemporary readers of Middle English. Unlike the Canterbury Tales, for the Troilus there has been little in the way of pedagogical materials that would help bridge the gap between the poem's demands and the skills and experience of its new readers.We are now gifted with two excellent teaching editions of the Troilus: alongside the Norton, edited by Stephen A. Barney and using the same critical text as the standard Riverside Chaucer, Broadview now offers this new edition, whose different textual basis and supplementary choices make it a worthy alternative more suitable in many pedagogical situations. Its text is based on a single manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Manuscript 61 (Cp), emended from other manuscripts only where the base manuscript is clearly defective. As the editors note, Cp is an excellent witness from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, easily available in digital format as well as facsimile for anyone who wishes to check a reading. As a consequence of the single-text approach, the notes treat textual considerations more frequently than is usual in teaching editions, and account for every major editorial intervention. For courses in Chaucer or medieval literature, these notes seem directed less toward students than toward instructors, who may be more familiar with the Riverside edition and thus would benefit from the orientation to this text. Otherwise the notes offer clear paraphrases of difficult passages, with relatively few gestures toward other literary works important to the poem's complex intertextuality. Marginal glosses are generous, which makes up partly for the too-brief glossary. Anyone wishing to pay detailed attention to lexis, however, would need to consult other reference works like the Middle English Dictionary or A Chaucer Glossary.The text is accompanied by an up-to-date introduction covering Chaucer's life and times, his literary affiliations, and his professional positions in the king's household; brief treatments of the literary tradition behind Troilus, the poem's characters, structure, philosophical stance, and pagan setting; versification and reception; and a succinct summary of many of the influential interpretations of the poem from the comparatist approach of Lewis, through the debates between patristic exegetes and New Critics; and also attending to feminist, new historicist, postmodern, and queer theory approaches. …

John Lydgate’s Use of Prepositions and Adverbs Meaning ‘Between’

Abstract The aim of the present study is to thoroughly analyse the prepositions and adverbs meaning ‘between’ in the works of a Late Middle English poet John Lydgate. As regards their quality, aspects such as the etymology, syntax, dialect, temporal and textual distribution of the analysed lexemes will be presented. In terms of the quantity, the actual number of tokens of the prepositions and adverbs meaning ‘between’ employed in John Lydgate’s works will be provided and compared to the parallel statistics concerning Middle English texts collected by the Middle English Dictionary online and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The most spectacular finding is that John Lydgate regularly uses atwēn, twēn(e) and atwix(t)(en), which are recorded in hardly any other Middle English texts. Moreover, the former two lexemes, and sporadically also atwix(t)(en), produce the highest number of tokens of all lexemes meaning ‘between’ in each analysed Lydgate’s text, which is unique in the whole history of the English language.

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

The Body of Law: Embodied Justice in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

This article argues that Malory undermines paradigms of divine, sovereign, and common law justice while suggesting embodied justice as a viable alternative that depends upon the agency of the body in debate. It explores the implications for women who gain greater access to judicial process via the mechanism of embodied justice and rejection of prescriptive law.

“Sirrah, What's Thy Name?”: The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sirrah in Relation to Sir and Sire in Late Middle and Early Modern English

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus.

Middle English Preposition Twēn(E)

Abstract The present paper focuses on the Middle English preposition twēn(e) ‘between, among, in between’. The aim of the study is to review the acknowledged etymology of twēn(e) as well as to provide its semantics, dialect distribution, complete textual distribution (record of texts employing twēn(e)), and absolute token frequency. Moreover, all texts including the preposition twēn(e) are subject to an analysis of the whole variety of prepositions meaning ‘between’ and their token frequency in order to establish the proportions of the use of twēn(e) and other discussed prepositions, especially the better established preposition betwēn(e) in texts employing twēn(e). The study is based on such extensive electronic databases as the Middle English Dictionary online, the Oxford English Dictionary online and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse as well as on a number of complete Middle English texts. The study of the corpus demonstrates the presence of twēn(e) and other prepositions meaning ‘between’ also in texts not listed by the Middle English Dictionary online or the Oxford English Dictionary online under appropriate entries, and thus helps to provide a more complete record of texts and authors utilizing twēn(e) and the extent of use of twēn(e) as compared to other prepositions meaning ‘between’. Moreover, the study demonstrates that also the other discussed prepositions are often not recorded in particular texts by the MED online or the OED online. In more general terms, the paper points out the need for the use of complete texts for the study of historical prepositions.